Allan Massie, Author at Catholic Herald

Allan Massie

2018 was a good year to be a book reviewer. Here’s why

December 20, 2018

Not all book reviewers are as despondent and sore oppressed as the one depicted by Orwell in a bleak essay. Some of us, after years in the game, still tear open Jiffy bags eagerly in the hope, if not always the expectation, of enjoyment. All the same when it comes to the annual task of

Nietzsche: the world’s most misunderstood philosopher?

November 29, 2018

I Am Dynamite: A Life of Nietzsche By Sue Prideaux, Faber, 444pp, £25/$30 Nietzsche is alive as most philosophers aren’t. This is partly because – in one sense – he wasn’t a philosopher at all, or at least not what we commonly understand as a philosopher. He wrote no coherent work, developed no system, advanced

Why ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ features little Catholicism but a lot of mumbo-jumbo

November 22, 2018

For many, myself among them, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell were the outstanding English novelists of the middle decades of the 20th century, and I have been reading and re-reading them since I was a schoolboy more than 60 years ago. There aren’t many novelists one doesn’t tire of, but repeatedly returns to.

Chapter & verse: The kitchen-table genius of a Catholic poet

October 18, 2018

Allan Massie reflects on the life and work of the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, who saw holiness in the natural world George Mackay Brown was born in Orkney in 1921 and died there in 1996. Apart from time spent studying at Newbattle Abbey and Edinburgh University, he scarcely left the islands. When the Scottish

Playing out Job’s struggle in the South Pacific

September 27, 2018

Allan Massie admires AN Wilson’s unfashionable preoccupation with theology Aftershocks by AN Wilson, Atlantic Books, 273pp, £16.99 AN Wilson’s first novel, The Sweets of Pimlico, was published a few weeks before my own debut. Yet, though we began together, he is younger by 10 years, and, while I have been fairly prolific, he has been

The day monks flogged the King of England

August 23, 2018

King of the North Wind by Claudia Gold, William Collins, 397pp, £25 Now that few schoolchildren study much history, and even fewer medieval times, there’s always a welcome for lively books directed at the general reader, all the more so because if any children are rashly led into the Middle Ages, they are probably required

Chapter & Verse: Brideshead re-edited

July 19, 2018

Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945, was Evelyn Waugh’s first explicitly Catholic novel. It lost him, he wrote later, “such esteem” as he had enjoyed among his contemporaries. This wasn’t, however, on account of its Catholic theme. Graham Greene was then writing novels in which the Catholic argument was inescapable, and these were highly praised. It

When Emancipation was ‘the lesser of two evils’

July 05, 2018

The King and the Catholics by Antonia Fraser, Weidenfeld, 336pp, £25 English Catholics lay low for most of the 18th century. They might, like many High Church Tories and country squires, drink to “The King over the water”, but only a handful of the 80,000 were engaged in the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745.

What do you do when you’ve just lost a war?

June 21, 2018

Hitler’s Collaborators by Philip Morgan, OUP, 366pp, £20 History is read backwards, but lived forwards. The historian must remember what we often forget – that events that are now in the past were once in the future. We all know that the Battle of France was lost in the early summer of 1940. We have

Happier times before the horrors of Auschwitz

May 31, 2018

The Last Interview by Primo Levi, Polity, 160pp, £12.99 It is more than 70 years since the publication of If This is a Man, the account of Primo Levi’s 11 months in Auschwitz, and just over 30 since he died, falling into the stairwell below the third floor family apartment in the Corso Re Umberto

Chapter & Verse: Whisky (and tobacco) galore

May 24, 2018

In a TLS article in 1914 Henry James named Compton Mackenzie as the great hope of the English novel, placing him ahead of DH Lawrence among others. Now, if Mackenzie is remembered at all, it is as the author of the agreeable farce Whisky Galore!, made into a still enjoyable film directed by Alexander Mackendrick.

A bishop’s post-Christian meditation on death

May 17, 2018

Waiting for the Last Bus by Richard Holloway, Canongate, £15.99 Richard Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. For many he was an inspiring preacher and caring pastor; for some a disturbing questioner and tiresome show-off. Gradually his faith in the certainties of organised religion, even of Christianity, ebbed away.

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